Comment by dreamweapon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dreamweapon | Hacker News Reader

This talk of mental health issues seems to obscure (and glamorize) a far more basic fact: many "founders" are simply too immature and inexperienced to handle the level of responsibility they've signed on the dotted line for.

Kind of like back when they might have, you know, signed up for that machine learning course with all that tricky linear algebra and stuff (which they never really learned the first time around -- perhaps because they were figuring that, like Peter Thiel, they were probably just going to drop out anyway).

Except this time around the consequences aren't about having some professor get grumpy at them, or wasting their tuition fees. It's about people -- who once considered them as friends, and trusted them implicitly -- being laid off, missing mortgage payments, having romantic partners leave them... fun stuff like that.

So "anxiety", "depression" are nice ways of saying that they've bitten off more than they can chew, and are basically shitting their pants... and praying for some higher power (an investor, an advisor, or a customer) to bail them out. Except it's not gonna happen. There's nothing going to stop their car from hitting that brick wall at 50 miles an hour this time, without a seatbelt.

So what's happening isn't that they're succumbing to mental illness... it's that they're learning, through their bodies and their minds, the way the world really works, and what impact their actions (and naïveté) can sometimes have, in terms of real consequences.

In, you know, that big scary world out there.

Downvotes are probably there due to sarcasm and because you assert that it is all learning and discount mental illness in 2nd to last paragraph.

But I agree with your argument.

In my opinion the current strong social pressure to be a "founder" has led many people to attempt it who are unfit to handle the challenges it brings.

Its the way of nature. Attempting to lead and failing is painful and possibly fatal. If you're a lion you don't start a convention celebrating your and other beta lion's failure to unseat the alpha. You either get busy plotting your attempt, or ctfo.

What is anyone railing against anyway? Founders risk depression. Alpha chimps test extremely high for stress. If you play the game for the biggest rewards it will be brutal, full stop. If your potential upside is 50 zillion dollars, you have just run out of sympathy points with everyone but your own kind.

I certainly wasn't intending to trivialize the suffering that some founders go through as a result of their experiences.

The point I was trying to make is what's touted as "mental illness" may be better looked at as a normal human response to the highly unusual, and extremely stressful circumstances these people have chosen to place themselves in.

That is to say: to the extent that we might subscribe to the concept of a "pain signal", and that depression and anxiety are among the various kinds of pain signals our body creates for us -- the "signal" in this case is not that they're "broken", or that something is systemically or constitutionally wrong with them. But rather, an indication of the fact that they've embarked on a course that perhaps they shouldn't have, and threatening to become (or perhaps already has become) unmanageable for them.

Aside from sarcasm, which invites opposition, I think you've touched on a taboo subject. I think what you say is true. At the same time I'd wager that a disproportionate number of founders have bipolar 2 tendencies, which will provide fuel and context to depressive episodes. If both are true, it becomes very tricky to determine cause. It becomes easier to focus on those potential causes which are outside our control, that depression is something that happens "to" us. Of course this is often the case where there is a medical issue, but as you point out, it is also often a result of circumstances and our reaction to them. Or even more confusingly of course, both.

Getting back to the original comment and how it was received, at the beginning of your comment you make a claim that is going to be controversial. From that point on, any introduction of sarcasm will push anyone not allied with your view towards open hostility.

Point taken. Thanks.

Downvoters -- explain, please.

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